Re: Floating Scopes

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "Jim Lux by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <jimlux-at-earthlink-dot-net>

At 11:17 AM 12/5/2002 -0700, you wrote:
>Original poster: "Nicholas Field by way of Terry Fritz 
><twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <nick.field-at-hvfx.co.uk>
>
>Hi Winston,
>
>If you can faraday screen it effectively then there should be no problem.
>Greg Leyh used a laptop scope inside the sphere of his BIG coil to measure
>streamer currents in the megavolt level output without any problems.
>
>You will have to be careful how you install it.  I would suggest that a
>stacked toroid arrangement, with the space between the two toroids filled by
>a chicken wire cylinder and the scope inside the wire, would provide great
>sheilding without compromising the performance of the coil unduly. Of course
>the precise arrangement depends on your coil.
>
>You might want to point a good video or stills camera at the scope as well
>as the binoculars, I find it much easier to evaluate things properly in the
>peace of my study than with massive sparks flying around the place!   If you
>do go ahead with this experiment be sure to post the results somewhere.
>
> > Hi All,
> >
> > I just bought a cute little Tektronix model 321 scope.  It is rated to
> > only 5 MHz, but that's OK, since it's battery powered, and was built
> > before 1963 :-)).  It's all solid state, too (not sure if that's good or
> > bad, yet).
> >

Another approach would be any battery powered scope with an RS232 
interface, and then a fiberoptic to RS232 link.

A wireless LAN interface could also work, although the RF noise from the TC 
might mean you'd have to configure data acquisition, then fire up the coil, 
turn the coil off, then fetch the data.

IRDA ports, while pretty lame in general, are available on a lot of real 
cheap laptops, and might provide a useful optical control interface to 
start and stop acquiring data.  A couple of pieces of the 1000 micron 
plastic fiber works quite well to send the signals a fair distance.

There are some inexpensive PC digital oscilloscopes (in the $100 range) 
some with USB, some with parallel, some with serial interfaces.